On a long enough timescale, all art has to stand alone. Eventually, there are no explanatory placards, no audio guide, no artist’s statement. There’s just a painting on the wall and nobody knows where it came from, who made it, or what it means. There are pictoglyphs in Utah and nobody knows who made them - they’re 3000 years old.

So why read the letters of an artist if the works are iconic enough to stand alone? We already know Vincent van Gogh is great. Do his paintings need words to back them up?

Why dive deeper into eternity?

In the case of Vincent van Gogh, the letters tell us that he was not just the best painter, but one of the best people to ever be on the planet.

Most people know about Vincent’s mysterious end, but few could summon thoughts about his more optimistic early years. In his younger years he seems to be full of hope, so much that he is ready to give life advice to his younger brother Theo. In his letters he talks about polishing his boots and encourages his younger brother to eat well, especially a lot of bread:

He polishes his boots, he eats bread, he keeps up with his brother and anticipates future letters. He writes to send letters, and writes to get letters back.

The letters arc like a novel, where Vincent starts out relatively orderly, optimistic, and powerful (eat bread!) and he ends up in a place where he has to ruthlessly defend his choices against his entire family, like in this passage where he falls in love with a single mother, Sien, and brings her into his home.

At the end of the passage above, he is truly like the ideal man in the Spice Girls song “Wannabe,” where Sporty Spice croons: “If you want my future, forget my past.”

We’re almost in a world that won’t judge our Vincents or our Siens. I’m not sure.

Vincent’s world didn’t leave him unjudged. In fact, it barely left him alone. It barely let him do anything, and it’s a miracle he made any work at all.

Vincent dedicates a heartbreaking amount of time to defending himself against his father in letters to Theo. He writes like a man attacked, writing to his only friend. He doesn’t depict himself as a saint, either, he admits he knows he is being stubborn upon several occasions. It’s funny that he writes only to Theo - maybe Theo is the only person in the family who was worth talking to, or, Vincent’s letters to his father were torn up or lost. It’s hard to imagine Vincent writing even MORE than this, but I wouldn’t put it past him.

Vincent seems stubborn at best in his letters-of-self-defense, and not too accusatory of those who antagonize him. And what if he’s right about how terrible his family is? What if his father and mother are stuck in their ways, and the rest of the world is moving on. The rest of the world isn’t aghast at loving a single mom.

When Vincent’s father finally dies, the concerns in the letters transform - Vincent is set free and can finally talk about, well, painting, in his letters instead of defending himself against his father.

The edition has only one letter from Theo, the Dear Brother, for the first 150 pages. The tone of the letter comes off as “Stop doing what you are doing and calm down, and say sorry to father.” At this point, Theo and Vincent are so upset that they are itemizing each of their argumentative points with numbers (1), (2), ect:

In response to this missive from Theo, Vincent writes back something like 5000 words, each itemizatized response to points (8), (9) ect as long as Theo’s entire letter. It would have been like writing a tweet and getting a novel in response.

Since the entire book is so one-sided - we get dozens of letters from Vincent and only one from Theo, Vincent is easy to sympathize with. You fall under his spell, and it’s a good spell. It’s not like reading the deranged journals of the protagonist in Pale Fire, or reading the diatribes of other mentally-understocked unreliable narrators. Yet, I wondered, what did Vincent do or say that made his colleague Mauve say to him “You are a vicious person?” Whatever it was, Vincent sort of leaves it out of the letters.

It’s more like reading a surprisingly reasonable defense against social crimes that are not nearly as bad as those of Paul Gauguin. Unlike Gauguin, cough, van Gogh never took a 14 year old as a wife - in fact all he wanted was to help a single mom. Van Gogh is like the Samwell Tarly of his time - he's already outcast from his family but falls in love with a single mom and loves her, gives her and her baby a home, and his father berates him for this and for many other shortcomings that Vincent seems to have. Vincent even refers to himself as a ‘nobody’.

If the world had more Sams and Vincents rather than fathers of abandon, imagine where we could be. In fact it’s probably the Sams and Vincents that keep it all together for us, the real fathers who know how terrible life can be for both men and women, and for all people, and who step in where nobody else will. It breaks my heart.

Reading these letters, you start to overly agree with Vincent - the world is actually very dumb, everyone sucks, Vincent is right about everything! But nobody can be that perfect, right? Citing suspicion of perfection, you can find the devil’s advocate on your shoulder wondering over these letters: What if he’s lying?

What if Vincent is casting himself as some sort of saint, where he’s really not?

But then - why would he lie? At best he could embellish, but he’s not interested in looking cool or being a savior. He’s not a land owner or a merchant, he self-identifies as a nobody. The letters are going only to Vincent’s little brother Theo, who isn’t impressed with Vincent at all. If Vincent wanted to preserve and glamorize himself in the eyes of his overbearing family, he would have never written about Sien at all. Instead, he nails himself to the cross.

In my whole life as an artist, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone represented more unfairly in popular culture or more misunderstood by non-artists. Van Gogh’s ear and suicide stand out as some of the most contested facts of art history. Was the ear a chapter of deranged self-harm, or was it Gauguin who chopped off the ear? Was Vincent’s death a suicide or was it a misaligned murder?

I’m not sure if these murder-mystery questions matter as much as we think they do. No matter what hurt van Gogh, we didn’t want it to happen. We didn’t want Vincent to get his ear cut off or for him to cut it off himself. We didn’t want him to kill himself or be murdered. We wanted Vincent to be around for a bit longer.

At one point, Vincent is beaming about how his doctor mistook him for an iron worker, and in other letters he carefully plots out how many years he had left. (Some artists live to 60 or 70!) Yes, carrying an easel all across the landscape will make you pretty buff.

Stress was plowing down on him from all directions - family, finance, occupation. He spent so much time defending his thoughts and choices. Sitting in my bed and staring at the letters, my poodle snoring and a TV show playing in the other room, I thought to myself: “What was the point of all of this fighting with his father ... what was the point of these thousands of words scrawled out across hundreds of pages. What if all of this time could have been spent on painting?”

Ultimately Vincent’s defense of himself and his ideas in his letters did matter for his painting - anyone else would have given up, not just on art, but on everything. His world was just crowded to the brink with antagonism. Vincent’s art didn’t happen because of his painful life, he made art despite it, and it’s simply amazing that it happened at all.

So, with all of his tenacity, why did van Gogh’s life end at such a young age?

I didn’t know what to make of the ending of this novel-of-letters. If we believe Van Gogh shot himself and was not assaulted, it’s as if Theo’s moment of weakness along with Vincent’s worsening epilepsy is enough to send Vincent over the edge. The moment that Theo shows weakness is the moment that Vincent gives in.

But I barely buy the suicide belief because Van Gogh was so interested in staying alive throughout all of his letters. The letters don’t even strike me as unhinged in a slight way, they’re simply very expressive. It wasn’t insane that Vincent could respond to Theo with novel-length itemized lists of arguments, it was just exhaustively comprehensive. Vincent spent his entire life defending his choices, accepting his choices, and believing in his work. Near the end, he even moved to a new asylum in the hope of getting better treatment.

Nobody could have cured Vincent’s epilepsy, but his hope was there. Why work so hard to get better, why be so intensely in love with the world, why defend yourself, and then just throw it all away? I think Vincent didn’t do himself in. It had to be something else.

The Letters are ultimately a mystery novel where there is no answer.

We’re lucky if private writing like Vincent’s letters surface every quarter century. It’s rare to find and even rarer for it to be interesting. Much of Vincent’s letters are brilliantly alive with feelings, and some of it is… Vincent is in the hospital, or he is dreaming about paint going on sale.

So, yes, the letters contain some mundane pieces - it’s not not forsaken romances and family feuds all the way down. Vincent is troubled by the same issues we might run into today - he voices his mistrust of clever lawyers, he gets expensive dental bills.

It’s Vincent’s unrepenting honest love for the world that is a treasure. Seeing Theo’s letter, honesty isn’t present in private letters all the time - letters can be as carefully buttoned up, as repentful, as punishing as life on stage.

Imagine the scholars of the future finding a private Youtube account on a server somewhere - all of it could be a heartbreakingly accurate revelation of our time, or it could be nine-minute reviews of Monster Energy Drinks.

Which could be, yes, it’s own revelation - but not as touching as Vincent scrawling off missives to his brother like “I’m dating a single mom, I don’t care what dad says!”

Where else can we find this honesty? Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations are best thought of as private journals or notes-to-self - Aurelius never meant for the writings to reach the world. Like Meditations, the letters of Vincent van Gogh were meant for the eyes of only one person, yet here we are reading them, translating them, publishing and republishing them, lamenting an untranscended 150 years of dental bills and expensive paint.

Aurelius’s private writings wouldn’t be so odd if other writers in his time weren’t marketing their work as savagely as Don Draper. The Roman poet Ovid was writing highly-sought, wildly popular advice to women on how to look beautiful and sexy in the Ars Amatoria one-hundred years before Aurelius was penning his notes-to-self on how evil never dies.

Even when van Gogh was writing his extremely private, thoughtful letters, Dickens was cranking away at words that would be cast out to thousands and later, millions of people. In our strange little time, we write furiously on Facebook walls and on Twitter, and each scribble has it’s own performative bent - we’re trying to look cool, or be funny, or do… something? Who really knows what we are doing when we share a thought on the internet, but it’s all very on-stage.

Reality exists, privately, and we only get to see it in letters like this. Perhaps the key to truth in art and writing is that we should all create as if nobody will hear us but the person we love most. It might be the only way to be eternal aside from painting.

This show of Vincent van Gogh in Houston is one of the best Van Gogh shows I’ve seen as far as diversity of work and the message of the show. Not every Van Gogh painting is here, but there are definitely paintings that are rare, less-seen, and drawings that floored me. Starry Night at the MoMA and Self Portrait at the Musee d’ Orsay are probably the two Van Goghs that we think about most, this show gives us reasons to see lesser-known Van Goghs in an iconic way.

Like the following three paintings after Millet:

Detail of the above painting, where the paint isn’t brushed on so much as applied like patches of bricklaying cement:

To this day I don’t know how Van Gogh painted this way. A brush doesn’t lay down color like a trowel, and to do it with a palette knife you’d have to have the patience of a saint. We all know the painting is a lovingly-made replica of one of Van Gogh’s art heroes, Millet, but how, how the heck did Van Gogh do this?

How did he paint like this, with the volume of the paint jutting out from the painting? Brushes press down paint and smooth it out, palette knifes lay down color, but there isn’t a tool in painting that lays down little embossed swatches of paint like the green swatches above. There just isn’t. Whatever Van Gogh was doing, he was using paint in an absolutely new way. He was laying it down and then shaping it, or he was loading his brush for every single stroke, dipping the brush and hitting the canvas, dipping the brush and hitting the canvas, over and over again. This would be an incredibly hard - but rewarding - way to paint.

In paintings like these, copies of Millet’s work of peasants bundling hay, the paint is applied and shifted in a way that would be less maddening. You can see that Van Gogh laid down colors and then shifted them, sculpted them across the canvas, later adding touches of atmosphere like the purplish haze around the hay and sky below.

Van Gogh never saw these peasants but he was often thinking about them. He loved Millet and cherished Tolstoy and ever since Potato Eaters, was more concerned with peasants than most.

Van Gogh had failed at many other courses in life before setting out to paint - he tried to be a teacher, he tried to be a preacher, and didn’t make it at either. While he didn’t succeed at painting financially in his lifetime, his success as a painter eternally stemmed from his habits of hanging up paintings and prints all around him in his rooms, and writing to his brother about paintings and landscapes. In reading Van Gogh’s lettters, I’ve never seen anyone be such a fan of other painters. In one letter to his brother from 1875, he writes a short greeting and then goes on to list all of the paintings he has hanging in his room:

He was studying these paintings like he studied and quoted The Bible in other letters.

When Van Gogh copies Millet or makes a painting ‘after Millet,’ the best we could analogy that we could make for our time is that Van Gogh made unabashed fan art. The paintings above are homages, or fan art, or both.

Like a kid who loves Spiderman so much that he starts doodling, Van Gogh loved Millet so much he wanted to make Millet paintings himself. He was relentless to learn and studied the hell out of painting and kept painting, and didn’t quit even when he got sick.

The book is a homeopathic remedy book. What about the smaller onion that has fallen onto the book’s cover? Did it just fall off, is it hiding something on the cover? Unlike a spread in Oprah, It’s not the most organized scene, but the onion is kind of hiding the book.

The lavender shadow in this painting almost did me in. I’ve never seen such a bright shadow. Though this was a painting of an asylum during Van Gogh’s stay there, it looks like a great place to recover. It looks like this place would heal anything.

It was nice to see The Rocks at this show in different lighting - though in the permanent collection at the MFAH, The Rocks takes on a new light against a darker wall in this exhibition. Typically it’s on the second floor of the museum and is against a lighter wall, though still encased in an ornate golden frame. I was so entranced by The Rocks when I saw it that I wrote a small mini-blog just about this painting, nothing else. Every time I see it in Houston, there’s something new to see. And it’s unlike any other Van Gogh I’ve seen. The sky relishes with broader, more lengthy strokes than other Van Gogh skies. Pink, yellow, blue cross the canvas and lead you to believe in a wind that shakes the dark tree. I believe in the rocks in this piece. Vincent could look at what would otherwise be someone’s throwaway photo and make something iconic out of it.

Vincent had mentioned The Rocks in a letter to Theo, where he complained about dust and wind. Painting en plein air means chaos seeps in from all angles - bugs, dust, wind, time, people walking up to you and asking you about art - all of these are challengers to making a painting outdoors.

Limited time does compress talent in a good way - you have to see accurately and replicate quickly, before the wind throws dirt into your skies.

In many Van Gogh paintings you can tell when he has acquired a new paintbrush - in the painting of a wheat field above, he has a larger brush by far than in other works and isn’t afraid to set it to work in the sky and foreground, where the smaller details are worked in the strip of trees in the horizon. The painting above could have been made with the staccato, small brushstrokes of Starry Night, but instead, more generous knifings of paint complete the atmosphere.

I’d never heard the story of the painting above, or seen the painting. If you’d asked me on who had made this painting I would have said an early Manet, maybe Lautrec on a weird day, someone else, but not Vincent van Gogh.

The painting depicts woman that Van Gogh was seeing at the time. He may have painted her right there or sketched her and painted her later, but either way, boy she looks glum. She looks like she’d rather be anywhere else.

According to the placard, the relationship later took a ‘stormy’ turn. Beer in one hand and cigarette in the other, this is how you get through dating Vincent Van Gogh.

(Okay, maybe that’s not beer, but it sure looks like beer)

The thought is that Van Gogh must have been too much for most people - committing himself to asylums, getting in fights with Gauguin, rejection after romantic rejection, failed jobs, living with his parents at age 30 … people just couldn’t really stand him after a while. But who knows? Maybe we’re looking at a guy who had a lot of the same problems that guys (and gals!) in their 20s have, and 150 years later, romance, jobs, and families are mostly the same. He tried to teach, he tried to preach, but painting was what he was meant to do and while Theo was a saint of financial and emotional support, it couldn’t save Vincent.

Speaking of Gauguin, the sitter for the portrait below had been painted by both Van Gogh and Gauguin in one sitting. This isn’t my favorite Van Gogh - here is why: in it you can see that with Gauguin sitting next to him, Van Gogh was influenced to paint more like Gauguin, which is not who Van Gogh was. Gauguin was a monster to others, Van Gogh was only a monster to himself.

Van Gogh tried on Gauguin’s more abstract style but ultimately rejected it for more realism, one of painting’s best ‘Be Yourself’ moments. Van Gogh is now described as post-impressionist because he doesn’t fit in with the impressionists, either - he was really his own thing.

Vincent Van Gogh being real

A portrait that is thought to be of Theo, Vincent’s beloved younger brother.

Impasto-clad peonies.

Many drawings in this show - rare and just as dramatic as his paintings.

The drawing above of a peasant woman is an earlier work, hung early in the show. I think you’re supposed to see it as sub-par compared to Van Gogh’s later drawings, but it’s full of unexpected promise. It could be early or late and I would have believed you. Like many drawings from Van Gogh, this drawing is not afraid of darkness. Approaching deeper values bravely isn’t something that all beginners do, but Van Gogh did it here and in his other drawings.

The display case below contains facsimiles of a sketchbook at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Far too delicate to move, the facsimiles displayed with the tools that Van Gogh might have used bring the sketchbook closer to us.

There are several displays of tools throughout this show that are well done - a paintbrush or pen in a case isn’t something you see often, and I found myself wondering why this was the case. Why don’t museums display more paintbrushes when museums throw a painting show?

A fundamental theme running through the show, placard after placard seemed to swoon and chime over the fact that Vincent had written so many letters to his brother, 830 in total, and - swoon! - thanks to all of these letters, we know so much about Vincent’s life!

Vincent is the art historian’s cake and cakewalk and eating it too, where other painters move in and out of existence through receipts, documents, lore, apocrypha.

Yet, even after all of his letters and works, we still don’t fully get him. His lovers or would-be lovers rejected him, his friends couldn’t stand him - the only person who seemed to understand him and believe in him was his younger brother Theo.

Van Gogh was an occasional all-caps kind of guy, though some pop-art depictions and accounts of his personality would make you think he was All All Caps, All The Time

If you aren’t bold, If you don’t write it down, if you don’t draw it, nobody will know. Writing and painting, for Vincent, were both equal forms of existing and expression. Loving God and loving his brother.

After the show of paintings and a cruise through the giftshop (a well done giftshop by the way), there is an awesome interactive display called Van Gogh Up Close. My Mom grabbed this photo of me below - someone - a team of designers and fabricators - built this whole replica of a painting and you could sit in it!

There were other lifesize replicas, projections of Starry Night, and paintings on whiteboards that you could try your hand at coloring in, or hijacking.

Stuffy art critics get mad about highly-instagrammable museum displays like this but I think they’re great. There’s nothing wrong with loving art and wanting to be a part of it. There’s nothing wrong with bringing art closer to everyday life, and everyday life closer to art. Van Gogh Up Close is a perfect name. Vincent never could have imagined people in the far future running in and out of his paintings like ghosts slipping through walls, but here we are.

Vincent van Gogh: His Life in Art runs until June 27th at the MFAH Houston